Summer Days and Summer Nights (14 page)

I'd never wanted to be somebody like my dad, who could just cut ties and take off with only hope stuffed in his pockets. But now I saw it differently. Maybe sometimes the best thing you can do is to burn it all down and start over. If we survived this night, I'd apply to UT. Hell, I'd fill out twelve applications.

I ran back to Dani. “Hey,” I whispered. “You pretty good with that bow?”

“For somebody who only took one semester of archery and ended up accidentally shooting Coach Pelson in the ass, yeah, I guess so.”

“Who says there's only one way to stop a cursed film from playing?” I offered a lame half-smile. “Options.”

Dani smiled back at me. “Options.”

“Do you have an answer for me, Mr. Grant? Your audience is hungry.” Scratsche gestured to the impatient demons.

“I do. I'd like to show you the trailer for my first short film, entitled
You're Not the Boss of Us
, in glorious 3-D.” I removed Cthulhu Shortcake from my pocket. “Dave—lighter, please.”

Dave handed over the blue Bic. “You sure you got this, bro?”

I took a deep breath. “Hope so.”

Behind me, I could hear the muffled, curious voices of Natalia and Alastair. “What's he doing?” “Is this a thing kids do nowadays?” “It's strange.” But they were the sounds of the past getting dimmer.

I stuck our plushie elder god to the tip of the arrow. “Sorry, Shortcake.”

“Enough, Mr. Grant!” Mr. Scratsche's voice was a thundering roar.

“Please! No talking during the movie,” I said, and with a shaking hand, I set Cthulhu Shortcake aflame. To Dani, I whispered, “Aim for the fireplace.”

She nodded and let the imitation
Robin Hood: Prince of Darkness
arrow sail. It pierced the screen, smoked, and fizzled out.

“Shit,” Dani said, and my heart sank.

“It's okay,” I told her, and I wondered if that's what Dani's mom had said to her little brother in the seconds before the plane hit the ground.

“Well, I'll be damned.” Alastair Findlay-Cushing was staring at the floor of the old movie mansion. A line of fire had traveled from our Cthulhu arrow through the screen and into the film. Natalia and Alastair coughed as their cinematic tomb filled with smoke.

Mr. Scratsche leaped to his feet. “No!”

“Betcha didn't see that twist coming,” I said.

A huge bang sounded. The rickety walls of the mansion shook. Natalia screamed as the swirling hole of the fireplace opened up and sucked her inside. A visibly shaken Alastair went for his drink, remembering at the last second that it was fake.

“Oh, fuck,” he grumbled, and then he, too, was gone.

Smoke billowed around the edges of the movie screen and spread into the theater. Mr. Scratsche pointed a gnarled finger at us. “Feed! Feed!” he roared to his demon minions. But they were confused by the order and began devouring each other in a bloody frenzy.

The scroll flew from Scratsche's pocket and hovered in the air. He made a desperate grab for it just before it disappeared. A hole opened in the center of the screen, a bottomless void that mirrored the black of Scratsche's widening eyes. Terrible sounds escaped from that darkness—howls of pain and sorrow, but also of loss and regret.

“No,” Scratsche gasped. “No, wait, I—”

A giant, flaming hand shot out from the darkness and closed its fiery fingers around the screaming Scratsche. He beat against its grip, but it was no use. He really was out of options. As the flaming hand dragged him back to his eternal nonrest, we heard only one last whimper. The hole closed.

For a moment, it was silent. And then everything went apeshit.

The screen bowed out, vomiting fire. Flocked wallpaper bubbled and blackened. Scraps of ceiling rained down in chunks, as if the theater were built on a fault line whose time had finally come.

“We're trapped!” Dave yelled, dodging flaming ceiling scraps.

My chest tightened at the thought of this being Scratsche's last laugh, one of those last-second horror movie gotcha! moments.

“Dani!” I coughed, taking hold of her hands. “I love you. I'm sorry it's ending this way.”

Dani's mouth settled into a tight line. “The fuck it's ending this way!” She ripped the edge of her shirt, wrapped it around the arrow, yanked it from the screen, and used it to pry open the fire exit door. “C'mon, y'all!” she yelled. “We out!”

This time,
she
reached for
my
hand, and we didn't waste any time running toward the open arms of the night.

*   *   *

Dani and I leaned against the trunk of her car in the light mist and watched the flames eat through the Cinegore. Fire truck sirens sounded in the distance. Just under their caterwauling, I could hear Dave on his phone. “Dude, you don't know what kind of night
I've
had. For starters, I've got brain goop on my jacket…”

The inferno intensified the oppressive stillness of the Texas night. We'd stripped down to our tanks and jeans. If I could've unzipped my skin and taken it off, I would have. Dani poured some Milk Duds into my palm. They were slightly melty, but that was the way I liked them best. She burst out laughing. I started laughing, too. It was the shock, for sure. Your emotions get super weird after you've been hunted by demons and forced to banish your boss to hell.

“Holy fuck,” I said, trying to settle.

“You can say that again.”

“Okay. Holy fuck.”

Dani stepped in front of me. With the flames behind her, she made me think of an avenging angel in a movie I wanted to see over and over. “Just checking: That actually happened, right?”

“Yeah. Pretty much.”

“Okay.” Dani nodded, more to herself than to me. “Okay.”

“This is insane!” Dave was selfie-ing the shit out of himself in front of the melting Cinegore. “I've already got one hundred and fifty-three retweets and over sixty favorites in just the last five minutes!”

“I need to sit down.” Dani unlocked her car and dropped into the driver's seat, keeping the door open to let some of the hot air escape. I got in on the passenger side. The car smelled like her—like popcorn, vanilla perfume, and something I didn't yet know but knew I wanted more of.

Dani clutched her car keys in her fist. “So, technically, is this our first date?”

Now that the adrenaline-laced fear was gone, a different sort of fear seized me. I'd opened myself up pretty wide in there when I thought I was going to die. It was time to deal with the aftermath of my honesty. But I was feeling okay with that. More than okay, in fact. “Yeah.” I let my head loll against the leather headrest. “Guess so. Sorry it's so weird—”

Dani leaned over and cut off my apology with a kiss. And when she did, all the movies went out of my head, because there was no invented story that could compete with the here-and-now feel of her lips on mine. Reluctantly, I broke away.

“Hold on,” I said, and reclined my seat.

Grinning, Dani did the same. And then it was
on
. We were a tangle of mouths and tongues, hands and legs, and, once, an unfortunate parking brake intrusion. It was making-up-for-lost-time kissing. You've-been-granted-a-second-chance-don't-waste-it kissing. Kissing with plenty of options.

Panting heavily, Dani broke away and stared up at the car's top. “Wow. Um. Why the hell haven't we done that before?”

“Right?” I managed between gulps of air. I couldn't wait to kiss her again. The pessimistic past was slipping away like the last of the rain. I felt strangely good. Maybe when the new Starbucks was built, I'd get a Frappuccino there. Maybe over Christmas break, when Dani and I were both home from school.

The sirens sharpened as they arrived. We brought our seats up again. In the rearview mirror, Dave was still reading his phone. “Over three hundred and climbing! This is so fucking rad!”

I shook my head. “Can you get a double major in Oblivious and Narcissistic at Stanford?”

Dani smiled. “Think he'll be all right if we go?”

“In a few minutes this place will be crawling with hunky firemen. So, yeah.”

Dani turned the key in the ignition. The car's first blast of AC was a blessing. “IHOP?”

“Mm-hmm.”

I could practically taste the pancakes, sweet and sugary good. They tasted like the future. Dani gunned the motor and faced the road where the bulldozers slept. Through the Mustang's windshield, the horizon was a vague impression of clouds and stars, a long line of pleasant darkness just waiting to take shape. It was still a long, long way from dawn.

 

It was the first night of summer vacation when my friends M and L and I piled into J's VW Bug and drove to Phases, the teen dance club deep in the San Fernando Valley, to escape sorrow and find the thing that we were looking for.

The four of us had spent the day at the beach and were all sunburned, even M and L, who were naturally dark. Heat radiated off of us, and J's car was saturated with the rich coconut-and-chemical scent of Bain de Soleil suntan oil. I was the palest of all us, and by the end of the summer there would be actual blisters on my chest from lying in the sun so often. Later, the blisters would scar. On the radio, loud new wave music played and we bopped in our seats and screamed the lyrics—about broken glass and summer and driving and lust and the beat—out the windows. As hot winds blew us along the 101 freeway, stars that had died long ago burned holes in the night with their brightness.

My friends and I were intent on burning brightly that night, too. We had just graduated from high school and would all be leaving for college in a few months. No more SAT scores or college applications to worry about. But a lot of other things.

*   *   *

I felt safe with J driving. As a little kid, when people asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she'd say “a hero,” but she'd settled on training to become a highway patrol officer after she graduated from college. She had learned to ski when she was three and to skateboard like a pro at ten, so I always felt I was in good hands when she was at the wheel. Once, coming back from a Knack concert, her Bug broke down in the fast lane of the freeway. J stayed calm while the rest of us screamed as we looked out the back window and saw headlights approaching, watched them swerve away just in time. A CHP officer rescued us. Maybe that's why J wanted to be one.

I'd known J and M since kindergarten. We'd met the first day. M and I were both drawing pictures when the teacher came over to look. I was used to getting a lot of praise for my artwork. But the teacher picked M's drawing of a horse and held it up.

“This is wonderful,” the teacher announced.

In ballet, the same thing happened. I loved dancing in my living room to my mom's records more than anything, but I couldn't follow the steps in class. M could.

“What a beautiful turnout you have,” the teacher told her.

She had always gotten better grades, too.

M, J, and I met L in our “gifted” classes in middle school. L was so quiet and mysterious with her smooth, brown skin and hair, her placid face. Even her frown was pretty. With her tiny nose, high forehead, and small, pointed ears, she sometimes looked like a slightly vexed cat. She was one of those girls that everyone has a crush on, but she didn't realize it and wouldn't have cared if she did. Or maybe she would have just found it annoying and stressful.

L and I did a science project together. Science was L's favorite subject, though she felt strongly about never experimenting on animals. She loved animals more than anything, probably more than people.

I went to L's house to work on the project. Her parents were kind, rather strict Mexican Americans, and she had two brothers who loved baseball. L and I baked batches of chocolate chip cookies, ate them all, and went on long runs together to burn off the calories. Then M and L started to go horseback riding or ice-skating after school and on weekends. I wasn't invited, so I hung out alone with J.

She took me skiing with her parents, who were old-fashioned Polish immigrants with a house full of tiny china figurines. While J skied the steepest slopes, I took a beginner lesson. It was fine while I was holding on to the waist of the cute instructor, but when I had to go by myself I lost control and fell, tumbling down the slope. I never tried it again. To soothe our sore muscles and my bruises, J and I took a Jacuzzi outside. Mist rose from the water and snow glowed around us as I felt myself start to relax.

Some skinny, long-haired boys in ski jackets were huddled by the pool, watching us. We smelled weed; they were smoking. J and I got out of the Jacuzzi and ran past them, through the freezing air, to the lodge, not even bothering to put on our clothes.

Later I wrote a poem about that night. The silvery pain of the cold, the way the boys' eyes made me feel warm, like gold.

I couldn't ski, horseback ride, or ice-skate well, but I had inherited a way with words from my screenwriter father and my poet mother. Maybe I wouldn't be a hero like J, a scientist like L, or an artist like M, but I wanted to do something with my life that would make people feel better, somehow. Words were the answer, but I didn't know it yet.